Lyrics

So I was recording birds today when....

4/13/2012 - DAVIS-MONTHAN AIR FORCE BASE, Ariz. -- A sonic boom was reported at around 2:45 p.m. today during the Thunder and Lightning Over Arizona 2012 Open House practice. After further investigation it was determined that one of the demonstrations did break the sound barrier causing a sonic boom.

It is uncommon for aircraft to break the sound barrier during a performance and is restricted over populated areas.

Anyone wishing to make a claim due to property damage, please contact the 355th Fighter Wing Claims office at 520-954-0146 or the 355th Fighter Wing Public Affairs office at 520-228-3406. Claims representatives will be sent to assess damage at your convenience. For more information on how to file a claim, please visit the D-M website at www.dm.af.mil.

Story

New work for door squeak composed in real time by Glenn Weyant, Tucson Arizona. Note door instrument changes with the weather. Rare periods of moisture, such as during the monsoon, create wonderful sonic possibilities.

Story

An improvised "in-motion" work for violin, viola, dogs (coughing and barking), birds, planes, performed/recorded in one take as the sun went down and the moon came up by Kestrel Weyant (violin) and Glenn Weyant (viola). Mix Notes: Neither panning nor other effects were used in this recording.

Story

From The Vault... Track Two from the 6/10/10 Tucson Sessions now banned in at least three states of mind. Hise on Electric Guitar processed via laptop and enhanced with sound samples. Weyant on Extended Wire Bungee Chair and violin. Hear Now.

Story

For millions of years there were shallow seas and eventually a desert. Then for the last fifty plus years there was a home. Today there is dusty a lot. Tomorrow something new and and supersized and shiny will arise. The sound of human progress in the desert is destruction. Twas ever thus...

Story

ICE-O-PHONE is a lo-rez segment from an external/internal recording do out later this month titled: Listening With Asperger's Ears To Tucson.

The ICE-O-PHONE is an invention of original design I use to explore the natural resonance of ice in recording the external audio environment.

The process of the ice reverting to water/gas results in pops, hisses and crackling.

There are also some feedback tones from the high amplification used.

Listening With Asperger's Ears To Tucson will be made available around June 20, 2010 as high quality downloads and limited edition, handcrafted and numbered double disc sets (only twenty copies will be produced).

The full recording utilizes techniques and ideas I've discovered and developed during a lifetime of listening to what is not usually heard.

The raw material for this recording comes from roughly 100 hours of sound gathered in the City of Tucson, Arizona, USA.

An additional 40 plus hours of orchestrating, editing and mixing the sounds culminated in the final recordings.

For more information about Listening With Asperger's Ears To Tucson, stay tuned or email me directly.

Story

Spring is NOW in Tucson's Urban Sonoran Desert: flowers are wilting, cacti are blooming, bees buzz about with pollen saddle bags, eggs are hatching and being eaten, lizards are scurrying, heat is building.

On this track some of the main solos are by mocking birds, finches, sparrows, pigeons, doves, quail, woodpeckers (banging on wod and metal), flickers, curve billed thrashers, and a cardinal.

Sitting in for this session are a neighbor's air conditioning drones (seems kind of early for air conditioning to me), trains, early morning commuters, wind, leaves.

There is about an hour of sound so turn it up, let it stream and wherever you are will become, sonically at least, Tucson Arizona in the early hours of 4/19/2010.

Story

The court audio was spliced and looped extensively to replicate the swamp of legal mumbo jumbo that permits building walls and roads in critical border habitat but simultaneously makes examples of American's doing what they do best: Helping people in need, regardless of race, religon or nationality.

Dan is a guy who found the body of a 14-year-old Salvadoran girl named Josseline who was migrating to America through the Southern Arizona, Sonoran desert.

His experiences in the borderlands motivated him to help other migrants from suffering the same fate.

So he started leaving water jugs in the desert.

A short time later, while distributing water jugs along migrant trails near the border, he was stopped by federal authorities and issued a citation.

Story

If You'd Like To Make A Cawl is circa 1991 and culled from an answering machine tape remixed in four tracks on a Tascam Porta-Two Hi-Speed casette recorder. The answering machine remix was layered over a bed of heavilly processed feedback. The work is part of an extensive archive of sound material dating between 1987 and 1999. Expect further releases from the vault as time allows.

Story

Winter Weather Report is circa 1988 and culled from a recording built with three cassette decks, electric guitar, paper, weather band radio, and Radio Shack microphones hung from the window of an apartment on Stegman Parkway in Jersey City. Two individual "tracks" were created by recording two separate works then playing them simultaneously through a stereo receiver and recording the result. This work is part of an extensive archive of sound material dating between 1987 and 1999. Expect further releases from the vault as time allows.

Story

Towards the end of 2009 I had a chance to conduct a sonic walkabout at Solar Culture prior to Jeph's set. Before leaving I left my recorder running to capture the sound of the space once we left for our walkabout, and then the sound of our return, encountering Jeph's work. My performance was my absence, the vacuum created by leaving and taking the audience with me. Upon our return people were so attuned to intentional listening that an audience member slurping a pomegranate was at times as much the sonic focus of Jeph's set as Jeph himself, for good or ill.

Story

On November 7 I was honored to set up a sound/vision installation again at the Annual Disco Day Of The Dead.

The gig is an invite only party, in a semi-secret location high in the Tucson Mountains somewhere along the line between National Park and so-called civilization.

The hosts and guests are generous and wonderful, and the space itself is designed for deep listening.

Outside I setup The Electric Ferris Box and created roughly five hours worth of soundscapes. On the wall of the home, visible for miles, we projected silent black and white films and video work by Adam Cooper-Teran.

But equally important, the installation was also influenced by the environmental sounds of crickets, planes, voices, and the party inside.

Playing in the night, beneath the stars, Tucson spreading like a phosphorous neon fungus across the landscape was mentally expansive. Not to mention the absurd moon which rose bloated and partially complete, lumbering up from behind the Catalina blackness only to melt back into the stars.

Story

Lyrics

Story

Shortly after this story ran, Davis Monthan launched a barrage of air traffic over the city. Not sure if it was in response to the NPR story but it sure seemed like it. Air traffic began moments after the story aired (around 8 a.m.) and continued past 11 a.m.

Planes fly over residential areas, schools and parks. Many parents in the flight path teach their children to cover their ears when the planes pass.

Recording is made with a Zoom H2 on the lowest recording setting, handheld out my front door. Any other setting and the plane would have been to loud to record.

Lyrics

Lyrics

Sonora baits her hooks these days, with orange blossoms and jasmine petals, in morning transitions of twilight, reclaiming the waking city, our collective delusion of immortal permanence, with cool perfumed breath.
In this time of desert spring, the first glow of new day, chasing the darkness from behind the Rincon Mountains, across the celestial dome and into the West, prods into being a chorus birds.
Finches join sparrows join flickers join thrashers join woodpeckers join doves join grackles join starlings join quail join hummingbirds in conversation and song.
The desert has fleeting seasons and there are barren times when the mind wonders about other places to be.
Places with more rain or more snow or more forests or perhaps an ocean stretching as far as the eye can see.
Places of new.
Places of more.
Places of possibility.
But just when those thoughts seem to be taking shape, Sonora reels you back in with her perfect storms of wildflowers, distant mountains and the strangely alluring promise of summer's ego draining oven blast and crystal blue sky.
Firmly hooked now and dragged under grinning, snug in the swirling vortex of early spring, letting go and spinning, another season beginning, a cup of green tea steaming, winter's lingering questions evaporate like water into the waiting day.

Lyrics

Visited Hotel Congress to play the wonderfully rickety and out of tune piano they had.
Thought I'd play it but found out from a guy mopping the floor and a woman working the front desk that it had been gone for three years.

Story

Lyrics

With so many questions about the passage of H.R. 2578, I thought I should give Ron Barber's office a call and get the facts for myself.

I was hoping for better for this newly elected Democrat, but from what I can tell, walls and roads trump endangered species and the USA gets a 100 mile DMZ from sea to shining sea. So much for land of the free, home of the brave....